Return On Ad Spend
topic on 8 shows · 11 statements across 11 episodes
Startup Acquisition Stories 
In Depth 
the Pitch 
Lenny's Podcast 
the Official SaaStr Podcast 
the Startup Ideas Podcast 
Top Founders 
20VC
11 statements about Return On Ad Spend, every show
AI agents excel at ad creative due to endless ideation capacity
“Agents are really good at ads because they have, like, endless ideas, whereas I feel like as humans, if you want your ROAS to be really high, you need to change it, like, every other day or so and change it, like, seven times over.”
Diao: Early paid acquisition should target breakeven ROAS, not 3x returns
“I don't think ROAS is necessarily the best target to start with. I think the best target to start with when you're investing in some of these paid channels, or channels with cash or financial investment up front, is to actually figure out whether or not this i…”
Slonimski: Target 3-Month Payback and 140-180% ROAS for Early Paid Acquisition
“I think when you just run paid, you need to think about payback around three months, and you can run with 141 180% for us. This is probably what I would be looking for.”
Courtney: Book funnels are complex, brittle, and difficult to track
“What I would warn against with a book funnel is it is a complex thing to build and to track. Like we have been building them for years and I, we still struggle. We still have like, what's our actual like return on ad spend today. We still, even though everythi…”
Middleton: Alvarez is the only founder this season to mention ROAS
“We've heard what now, 12 or 14 pitches this season. He's the only person who's mentioned ROAS.”
Use paid ads for quick testing, not scaling early-stage startup growth
“Ads are a very good way to get traffic quickly for testing. So suppose, you know, you're an early stage B to B company and you have very little traffic and you've come up with three, you've interviewed all your customers and you found there's three different b…”
Harris: Cloudbeds' Amplify product delivers a 13x return on ad spend
“The ROAS on all of that dollar spent with us is in the teens in terms of Multiple return on, on, on their money spent. So like giving a 13 X return on every dollar they spend with us is beautiful.”
Kenny: Early text-message carousel ads delivered a 5x ROAS
“My initial ads were static carousel images of text messages that someone might send after standing up for themselves or affirmations to remind them of themselves. And then the final carousel would be a picture of the Of the journal, but it was very incongruent…”
Adding dogs to furniture photos doubled or tripled social ad ROAS
“And one of the art directors was like, put the dog on the couch and let's take some photos of, you know, dogs on, on furniture, which made it more playful and approachable. That one change resulted in a total unlock of their performance on paid social channels…”
Abousleiman: Lower Ad Returns Make Direct Customer Communication Imperative in DTC
“In the new reality of DTC today, it's really difficult to get the same return on ad spend that you used to get. And it's really imperative to have a channel to communicate with your customers one-on-one to be able to like personalize commerce.”